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Pushed by growing anger among Americans over the slow economic recovery, "jobs" has become the buzzword of the political season.

President Barack Obama mentioned it almost 20 times during his first State of the Union speech. Republican and Democrat leaders vow that job creation will drive their agendas as they push toward the midterm elections this year.

Good luck, say the experts.

Yes, job creation works great in a recovering economy, but making that happen in the legislative arena is problematic, said Steven S. Smith, director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washington University.

Ultimately, Smith points out, government is at the mercy of the fundamental forces that dictate the cycles of the economy. "It is very difficult for the typical legislator to have any impact on factory job production. All that is due to consumer demand."

This year, the stakes are high, not just for the economy, but for numerous political candidates promising to fix it. In November, 36 U.S. Senate seats (one each in Missouri and Illinois) are in play, as well as the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 36 governors’ posts, including Illinois. The winning candidates likely will be those who are able to win over voters like Festus resident Gary Cole.

Laid off in May after 25 years building Chrysler minivans and pickups in Fenton, Cole has little interest in health care reform, global warming or the other policies that dominated the conversation during Obama’s first year in office.

His interest, in fact, is embedded in a single issue — getting a job.

"They have to figure something out because there is no work out here," Cole said.

Politicians might have embraced the jobs issue sooner had they made regular visits to unemployment offices. The career center in Arnold, where Cole is a regular visitor, assisted more than 7,400 displaced workers in December alone.

"There are lots of frustrated people," said Diana Voelker, the state Department of Economic Development regional manager overseeing the Arnold center.

Smith said that even if new jobs are hard to come by, the shrewd candidate will acknowledge that frustration with empathy during the upcoming campaigns. Beyond that, there isn’t much national politicians can do to help the unemployed get back to work, said David Webber, an associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a specialist in legislative policy.

"The U.S. Congress should focus on financial regulation, trade policy and the big picture of human capital development and leave the nitty-gritty of economic development to state and local governments" said Webber, the father of Missouri state Rep. Stephen Webber, D-Columbia.

State and local officials, in turn, need to target sectors capable of establishing a regional economic identity, David Webber added. As an example, he cited Gov. Jay Nixon’s bid to position Missouri as a go-to state for bio-research and production.

Market economics notwithstanding, candidates can pretty much count on even employed voters — like software analyst Greg Schmidt of Bethalto — to pay attention to jobs initiatives when they pull the levers at the ballot box in November.

Jobs "have to be the No. 1 thing, and anyone who doesn’t see that doesn’t get it," said Schmidt. "When people are working, they feel better about everything. They are keeping a roof over their heads. Their kids are being fed."

Republican U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt and Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, his expected Democratic opponent in the November election, say they have taken notice of the public discontent with the pace of job recovery. The U.S. unemployment rate is at 10 percent, though it doesn’t factor the underemployed and discouraged workers, those who want to work but have given up looking.

"From the people we talk to around Missouri every day, it’s clear that folks are hurting and job creation must be a priority," said Carnahan spokesman Linden Zakula.

The two candidates agree that paving the way for small businesses to add payroll is key to easing joblessness. But they fundamentally disagree over the value of the Obama administration’s stimulus package.

Zakula said Carnahan is committed to removing the "red tape" that tamps down hiring by choking the resources of small businesses.

In a telephone interview earlier this week, Blunt fixed the blame for the unemployment crisis on the "colossal failure" of the Recovery Act and what he characterizes as the misplaced priorities of the administration and Democratic-controlled Congress.

"I think people are pretty smart about how the process works, and they understand what can happen with a majority party that is big enough to do whatever it wants to do," he said.

Such sentiment is a far cry from the public reaction when the government stepped in to stem the worst job hemorrhage in the nation’s history 75 years ago, said Margaret Garb, a history professor at Washington University, who focuses on job creation during the Great Depression.

The public works projects and other recovery programs introduced by the Roosevelt administration were "wildly popular," said Garb. The beleaguered public welcomed "the hand of the federal government in their lives and their pocketbooks," she added.

Nearly every town and every city saw tangible evidence of FDR’s policies in the construction of post offices and other projects that provided paychecks, Garb said. The backlash against the Obama stimulus package resides, in part, with its failure so far to produce such tangible outcomes.

"The stimulus money isn’t visible," she said. "People don’t see it working yet in their communities."

Part of the challenge for Obama, Garb said, is a 24-hour news cycle that has fueled the public’s desire for a quick fix to complex problems, such as double-digit unemployment. "People expect a quicker response than what is possible," she said.

For Sherry Orrick of Imperial, the clock started ticking a year ago when she lost her job as a police officer. Since then, she has found nothing but frustration in her job search. "Every week is the same: Nobody is hiring, or they say I’m overqualified."

Orrick said she has spent the last year watching the government extend a hand to the banks, the auto companies and Wall Street.

Now, she says, it’s her turn.

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